I have never, literally, never, taken an intentional photograph using exposure bracketing. I’ve had to play with the feature a bit in some cameras, just so I know where it is and roughly how it works in case any client has an issue or needs help. But really have never used it. Of course the cameras I use generally are capable of the widest dynamic range of any cameras in the industry, and I often find my results are just fine. But for those really critical situations … I wondered if exposure bracketing was even worth it.  I always shoot with my exposure set to manual mode. Trust me, it’s not for bragging rights, I’m not sure why, really. I’m stubborn? I am a control freak? I don’t know, but it’s never been a problem for me, so I’ve never changed to any auto processes. I assess the scene visually, take a –  by now – pretty good guess at it, and I’m usually dead on, or pretty close, within a stop or so, and I make an adjustment and then just go. I often don’t even use the in-camera meter. This sounds really bad, doesn’t it? I’m not advocating this for professional or critical work.  But recently, the subject of exposure bracketing came up, and in this case, it happened to be with the only digital back/technical camera capable of doing so, which is the Phase One IQ4/X Shutter system. A client contacted me with a question about it, and I grabbed a kit off the shelf and took a quick look at it, answered the question, all good. But then they said something that threw me – “For when I use Auto HDR Merge in Capture One”. And I went, wha? Since I don’t use exposure bracketing, I hadn’t paid any attention to this feature in Capture One (I can’t tell you when it first appeared). So I played with it a bit, and came away thinking – Wow, that’s pretty fast and easy. But then this all took me back to – Why am I not using Exposure Bracketing? At least for critical photographs …. I do sometimes attempt to take photographs that are important to me from an artistic sense. Well, there’s no need to use it if I can’t really discern an obvious benefit to me. So I decided to shoot a very quick test of decidedly non-critical subject matter (inside CI HQ). Accessing the Automatic Exposure Bracket tool is a swipe right to left from the Phase One IQ4 Home Screen, at that point you have an easy to navigate interface where you can choose from 2-7 shots in the bracket and a range from 0.3 to 3.0 stops between each capture (segmented by 1/3 stops). Quick Test – Auto Exp Bracket vs Dual Exposure Plus vs Standard Single Capture I shot a 3 shot capture sequence with a 2 stop value bracket with our IQ4 150 and XT body and a 32mm HR-W Rodenstock Lens in X Shutter. In Capture One, I then selected the 3 files, control clicked on the thumbnail of one of them and selected Merge to HDR (which produces a single .DNG file). I then compared the results with the single shot capture of the scene, and also a Dual Exposure Plus capture. The captures were made to prioritize the highlight data. The shadow data for all 3 files was pushed substantially. Each file had a 100 value Shadow Tool push and between 40-80 value push with the Black Tool. That’s a good 5-7 stop push. The merged HDR from the exposure bracket produced a cleaner file than either of the non bracketed files. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the standard file results, but the auto bracketed file was even cleaner than the Dual Exposure Plus file. For those of you unfamiliar with Phase One’s Dual Exposure Plus feature (IQ4 only), it creates 2 very fast captures with one shutter press, the files are 3 stops apart and compiled into a single file, which results in 3 extra stops of shadow data. It allows you to very conservatively nail highlight detail and still retain integrity from the extra shadow push. The final file from the auto bracket is comprised of 3 shots with a +2 exposure delta between each shot, and one of those 3 shots will have lifted shadows, one is a middle-ish ground, and one will have pulled down highlights. So the data is there already without Capture One having to push or pull, it can simply intelligently composite. What does this mean for me? I don’t know, I may consider using auto exposure bracketing in the future. Certainly with a Fuji GFX, as there is no in-camera tool like Dual Exposure Plus. What does this mean for you? If you haven’t used auto exposure bracketing, it could be worth a try. And if you use an X Shutter lens, this is the only tech camera solution that has this capability. And it is about the X Shutter, because this can be accomplished on the Phase One XT Camera of course, but also with any Alpa, Cambo, or Arca Swiss tech camera, as long as there is an IQ4 on the back of it and a lens with an X Shutter on the front. Summation In at least some situations it is hard to find a better result in terms of noise than using your camera’s Auto Exposure Bracketing and Merge To HDR in Capture One. The results for Phase One IQ4 users may be close enough that one could decide to use Dual Exposure Plus rather than Auto Bracketing. Benefits for Dual Exposure Plus are that it accomplishes the result in 2 captures, while most photographers use 3-5 shots in a bracket. Also, the result is accomplished in-camera, the downloaded result is a single file. While a bracket will be comprised of all the shots downloaded individually and then requiring assembly in Capture One

It’s time to revisit the subject of LCC’s (Lens Cast Calibration) within Capture One and how they benefit various photographic needs, within the typical use cases of photography, technical camera photography as well as within the world of art reproduction. The primary and original use for the LCC was to equalize color and tone variability of technical camera lenses when captured digitally. With any lens there is a natural amount of vignette that can manifest from the center of the capture to the edges, and most of the time this isn’t an issue for image making, in fact I typically like the natural subtle vignette of optics. When capturing with traditional view cameras or technical cameras however, heaver artifacts and asymmetric vignettes can present that need mitigation, especially when pushing out the edges of the optical projection to the sensor. The process of creating a LCC to remove lens cast is simple and straightforward: • At the time of shooting your practical shots, and again for any new & unique configuration of camera movements, place a piece of milky plexiglass (like the Pocket LCC Lens Cast Correction Tool) at the lens and make a proper exposure for the LCC process which typically about +2 stops of time increase over your practical exposure so that the rise of your mid-tone to highlight histogram bubble is in the right 2/3rds, making sure not to clip the edge of it off the overexposed side. • Import your practical images and your raw LCC files into Capture One • Identify the LCC ‘characterization image’ within the thumbnails, right-click on it and ‘Create LCC’, making sure that ‘Color Cast’ and ‘Enable Uniform Light’ boxes are both checked. • Select the LCC and any images you want to augment with the LCC, right click and ‘Apply LCC’ Viola! The color cast and vignette are removed. The LCC essentially identifies the color cast & light fall off and Capture One basically applies a reverse curve to the custom color/tone mask that the LCC has identified, removing them from the RAW source image. (You must shoot RAW to take advantage of this tool!) It is important that the image to serve as the LCC is properly exposed to the brightest portion approaching the limits of the sensor, typically in 8-bit exposure numbers you want to see ~245 as your brightest value as this brings up the number of shades of change in the lower color numbers where it’s pivotal to have more rather than less shades of grey to gracefully reverse vignette shadows and color pollution. Related to this subject is the use of a portion of this same LCC process for uses within Art Reproduction in order to equalize out light on set for an added level of precision, discussed in The Reproduction Lighting Trick that will save you HOURS. For More Resources from Brad Kaye and the Medium Format Experts Follow Us, & Subscribe to Our Newsletter! Recent Blogs from Brad Kaye

It’s time to revisit the subject of LCC’s (Lens Cast Calibration) within Capture One and how they benefit various photographic needs, within the typical use cases of photography, technical camera photography and less known within the world of art reproduction.   The primary and original use for the LCC was to equalize color and tone variability of technical camera lenses when captured digitally.  With any lens there is a natural amount of vignette that can manifest from the center of the capture to the edges, and most of the time this isn’t an issue for image making, in fact I typically like the natural subtle vignette of optics.  When capturing with traditional view cameras or technical cameras however, heavier artifacts and asymmetric vignettes can present that require mitigation.   Within the realm of art reproduction, not only will the lens require some subtle vignette removal, but if your lighting isn’t perfectly uniform, the LCC process can be of massive benefit and a time saver for precisely equalizing light values across your set. In the case below and in the video that accompanies this post, I’ve purposely set the lights at different distances from the art reproduction set and also varied the light output side to side to a truly unreasonable level to demonstrate this point. (58 points of light variation) The process of creating a LCC to equalize out light on set slightly different than the lens-only method, but remains a simple process: For More Resources from Brad Kaye and the Medium Format Experts Follow Us, & Subscribe to Our Newsletter! Recent Blogs from Brad Kaye

Having been a Hasselblad Phocus user for many, many years, going back to the very early development stages, and before that even with Hasselblad/Imacon Flexcolor software, I’ve had a close relationship with the evolution of this software platform, both as a user, a hands-on specialist of the Hasselblad camera platform, and the recipient of a substantial amount of client feedback. Probably the most common complaint I’ve encountered has been the lack of speed of the Phocus software. Reports that range from “lack of zippiness” to just plain un-responsive, what I call the Corona Beer Effect (spinning beach ball – get it?). But the reports have always been on the inconsistent side, hard to reproduce and verify, and so it has been assumed that the program is just very demanding in terms of the computing power desired to function efficiently, maxing out RAM and GPU, with a fast processor and a fast, uncluttered, hard drive. But still, even presuming that, and using more powerful hardware, some reports would persist. And then the other day, this happened. Notice in this screen recording, I am first clicking on raw file, raw file, raw file, 3 times in a row, and the response is almost instant. These are 100mp X2D files. Now, notice what happens if I click on the associated tiff files of those raw files. Corona Effect. To the point of un-responsiveness. When you see my blue curser just sitting there, sort of moving, that’s me clicking and clicking and nothing is happening. Even after the image finally displays, if I try to do anything else, use the zoom tool, try to crop it, it is completely locked into the spinning beach ball that you cannot see in a Screen Recording (see below). Even if I try to ignore the tiff files and click on raws and work on them, the damage is done, it struggles to recover from the spinning beach ball caused from clicking on the tiff file and I can’t even effectively work on the raw file. I have reported this to Hasselblad. It took several rounds of back and forth for them to see and understand what I was describing (and their continuing attention was and is appreciated). I have also requested from clients that they attempt to reproduce this to make sure there isn’t something unique about the combination of my computer hardware (16′ Macbook Pro 16 Core M1/32GB RAM) and my software (Mac OS 14.6.1, Phocus version 3.8.4 and then 3.8.5). And in every case, my clients replicated the issue. I don’t know if this is also present on the Windows platform. That would be a good test to run for any Windows users out there. I don’t know much about coding, but it feels to me like a memory allocation issue. The 100mp raw files in this case are around 165mb, the 100% tiff files are 305mb. However, both Capture One and Adobe handle these files with ease, with near instant response and no Corona Effect. In Capture One, even simultaneously viewing and working on three 700mb stitched pano tiffs results in no lag. But even a single standard 305mb tiff export from an X2D file – their own camera, mind you – ties things up in Phocus. Now, naturally, Hasselblad does not invest the software resources into Phocus at the level of say, a Capture One. But this feels like their memory allocation is still stuck in the code from 20mb – 40mb raw file capture from 15 years ago and hasn’t been paid enough attention to with the newer, higher resolution cameras. Note that I see this less with reduced (sub 100%) tiff files, but I still see it with scaled up jpg files at the full size tiff file sizes, so the file size, not the type of file, clearly seems to be the issue. What To Do In any event, because I do receive complaints about the lack of zippiness with Phocus, this is a message to check your folders, and make sure you’re not viewing tiff files in Phocus. Note that I see this less with reduced (sub 100%) tiff files, so the files size, not the type of file clearly seems to be the issue. Don’t mix your tiff files with your raw files. For More Steve Hendrix Blogs For More Resources from the Medium Format Experts Follow Us, & Subscribe to Our Newsletter!